1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to storage area networks. More specifically, the present invention provides mechanisms for providing quality of service using zones in a fibre channel fabric.
2. Description of Related Art
In many fibre channel based storage area networks (SANs), support for quality of service is limited. One typical mechanism for providing quality of service involves assigning a quality of service level to individual flows. A flow typically includes a source and a destination. A storage area network can have thousands of hosts and end devices and thousands of corresponding world wide names. Assigning quality of service levels to flows identified using world wide names or similar identifiers can be difficult to configure and maintain. Distribution of the QoS configuration is also needed to ensure that a flow gets the same QoS even if an associated device is moved to a different domain.
Zoning is a mechanism supported in storage area networks. Zoning allows the partition of a fibre channel fabric into smaller fabrics to allow the implementation of features such as security and restrictions. Devices belonging to a single functional group are typically placed under the same zone. For example, devices involved in online transactions can be placed in one zone while devices associated with backing up user data can be placed in another zone. Because of the diverse nature of the traffic in a fabric, it is beneficial to provide different QoS requirements for functionally dissimilar groups.
Although zoning helps in segregating different user groups, it does not provide service differentiation across zones. Consequently, it is therefore desirable to provide methods and apparatus for providing improved quality of service mechanisms in a fibre channel fabric. The quality of service mechanisms can provide a higher level of abstraction for configuring QoS and distributing QoS information across the fibre channel fabric.